“impossible ideas”

Rented a bike the other day and rode around San Francisco for the first time. I was as happy as can be. Very physical, dog-like, movement-for-the-sake-of-movement fun. Fell in love with this beautiful city all over again, the place makes much more sense on a bike, distances feel right: pretty much everything is just a couple of minutes away.

But, you know me, as soon as I jumped on the bike I started thinking of ways to make it better. My main beef is in the context of sidewalks: bikes take too much space and are too hard to control at very slow, almost stop, speeds. Also, riding hills is too hard.

So, here a proposal to address these concerns. A bike for the city, for sidewalks, for standing:

What d’you think?

Updates 10/June/2008:

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.

Hoy, en la fila para ordenar de Il Tavolo, que siempre es exquisito, habia un grupo de amigas que siendo su primera vez pidieron una enumeracion de lo que ofrecia el bistro. Ya para terminar la retahila menciona el cajero que tenian “tes de raspberry y naranja”. “Naranja y que?”, pregunta confundida una de las amigas (la mas bella, de cejas oscuras y cabellos claros, a la Kate Winslet). “Naranja y raspberry”, responde inmutable el cajero y sigue impasible durante la larga pausa en que la amiga evidencia seguir en ayunas. “Uno de naranja,” acaba respondiendo atolondrada.

Siguieron el resto de las amigas y ya para cuando toco mi turno habia encontrado en mi Blackberry (!) la traduccion de raspberry, que me evadio en ese momento. “Frambuesa!” Es lo primero que le digo al cajero. “Es raspberry en epanhol”. “Es lo mismo”, me responde enfadado. Pero no, no lo es. Porque con frambuesa te hubieras comunicado, con raspberry confundiste.

Lejos, muy lejos, estoy de ser un purista del espanhol o un paranoico anticolonialista (si acaso soy el colonialista…). Como cualquier amigo puede atestiguar y al igual que muchos de ellos, mi lengua materna es el spanglish y hoy en dia escribo (blogs, correos, messenger) casi siempre en ingles siempre que mi interlocutor lo hable aunque sea como segunda lengua. Pero trato siempre que hablo con alguien que solo habla espanhol de anotar mi spanglish natural con sinonimos o parafraseos en espanhol. No hacerlo, no intentarlo siquiera, es lo que me espanto de este cajero. Si no te preocupa que te entiendan, para que hablar?

Ahora que siguiendo esta logica del entendimiento la verdad es que no hay mas que reconocer que sino fuera por flojera, condicionamiento, y, si, pedanteria tendria todo el sentido del mundo sustituir blog por bitacora, messenger por mensajeria instantanea, marketing por mercadeo (la otra vez vi marquetin!), link por enlace y asi (en vez de etcetera, que es nomas latin para “y el resto…”). Hasta ahi todo va bien para los academicos pero porque parar ahi? Por que no es medico de ninhos el pediatra, medico de la piel el dermatologo, musculo del corazon el miocardio, aprendiz por si mismo el autodidacta, inflamacion del estomago la gastritis y asi?

Y bueno, ya siguiendo esta logica de entendimiento hasta sus ultimas consecuencias, por que no aprender Esperanto, “el buen lenguaje”?

I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.

After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.

Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,

how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?

The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.


This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.

By focusing on the number of individuals (genders) required for reproduction we can distinguish species into three classes: those that require one individual (self-reproducers), those that require two (pair reproducers), and those that require three or more (group reproducers). The question is thus: are there group reproducer species? why?

We usually refer to the first class as asexuals, the second as sexuals, and it is a major puzzle of evolutionary biology to account for the existence of the latter^{D, WP}. Like the bee that fluttered in the face of our best aerodynamic theories, sexuals mate impudently in the face of our best evolutionary theories.

But sexuals exist. Everywhere, in fact, at our order of magnitude. So we can’t just sweep pair reproducers aside and carry on our happy, simple theorizing of a self-reproducing world.

Asking the group reproducer question, on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by people to whom it comes as a revelation that the class is obviously empty. I don’t think it is. Obvious, that is. Life on earth does some pretty fucked up stuff, natural gangbanging doesn’t strike me as particularly eccentric. Asimov describes a group reproducer species in great detail in The God Themselves and neither the author nor I (before) ever thought the point merited any explanation.

And if there are no group reproducers (or precious few) their non-existence (or extreme dearth) is as much a fact in need of explanation as their existence (or abundance).

Transhumanist transgender Martine Rothblatt proposes the most original solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve ever conceived: Two Stars for Peace—the incorporation of Palestine and Israel into the U.S. as the 51st and 52nd states. She has wrote a book making the detailed case and has spoken about it on Sirius satellite radio:

This is so far out our ordinary could I’m still shocked. My rather unusual Mexican high school put an odd emphasis on the Middle East and this is by far the best idea I know of. Just imagine, fighting war with peace. Hope. Freedom.

If you are in a hurry, jump ahead to the 3-minute screencast to see what this is all about.

Not for the first time I’ve woken thinking that the invention of dirt-cheap, high quality multi-touch wallscreens would prove as epoch making as the printing press, a cure for cancer, or the web. Most people, of course, scoff. They can barely see the point of computer screens bigger than 15”. It is not my intention now to disabuse the heathen. Let’s just assume that we have such wondrous interfaces and see how far we can run with them in one particular direction.

Close your eyes and imagine that you somehow —digital contact lens, projectors, VR goggles, pixie dust— have access to a screen at least as big as a wall—a humongous HD screen that is not only a pleasure to look at but with which you can interact. Mouse and keyboard would suffice for our purposes here, but since we’re dreaming, feel free to indulge in Jeff-Han-style touch interaction.

Despite the mind-boggling immersive multimedia we can expect, text won’t go away. Not only will we still gulp it down, we’ll likely drown in it. Text has advantages all of its own and in a digital word there’s nothing cheaper or more malleable. Reading newspapers, books, magazines, blogs, emails, and tutorials will still be an everyday staple. It’ll just be by and far all digital now.

The question thus is how we’ll read all this text. How do you take advantage of a massive pixel landscape when your goal is reading? You could recreate books in all their physicality, down to the flashy turning of pages, the weight, the fixed dimensions, and the mahogany bookshelf. We would certainly be able to copy it all in breathtaking detail, but limiting ourselves to such molds wouldn’t only be wrong, it would be perverse. Let’s see if we can do better than that.

I wonder how widespread is the concept. Please leave a comment with your answer. A simple yes or no will suffice. Though if you have a strong opinion about them I’d be glad to hear it. Also interesting to hear would be how you heard about them—quality management class? invented them on your own? late night Wikipedia? serendipity?

Espanhol llano es espanhol escrito sin acentos, ñ (que se suele sustituir por nh, nn o simplemente n), dieresis o signos de puntuacion iniciales (¿¡).

Perfectamente inteligible para hablantes del dialecto ortografico dominante, el espanhol llano entra en auge a la par que el teclado, cuya dificultad intrinseca para escribir caracteres especiales se vuelve el argumento original a su favor. Hoy en dia las razones para usarlo son enormemente variadas.

Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)

Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows End^{WP, AM}.

Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!